The ENUBET project aims at demonstrating that the systematics in neutrino fluxes from conventional beams can be reduced to 1% by monitoring positrons from K$_{e3}$ decays in an instrumented decay tunnel, thus allowing a precise measurement of the $\nu_e$ (and $\overline{\nu}_e$) cross section. This contribution will report the results achieved in the first year of activities. The expected neutrino fluxes at an hypothetical far detector have been estimated. Progress have been made in the design of the hadron beamline and a complete simulation of the positron tagger allowed to determine its performance in terms of signal selection efficiency and purity. A deep R&D program has been pursued to explore different technical solution for the tagger instrumentation. Test beam exposures of detector prototypes have been performed to assess their response to pions, electrons and muons and to validate the Monte Carlo simulation.